Ok, so i consider myself to be fairly good at Rock Band drums. I can 5 star pretty much all of hard and get to the latter half of Expert. I started GH Metallica the other day on Drums for the first time. Just for kicks, I started on easy. For starters, why does Neversoft insist on making the easy mode beats go Red, Yellow, Red, Yellow, etc... instead of Yellow, Yellow, Yellow, Red/Yellow, Yellow, Yellow, Yellow, Red/Yellow, like how Rock Band does it? It seems like Guitar Hero throws more pad hits at you on Easy than Rock Band did, but the bass pedal is more neglected.

Anyway, so I 5 starred all of Easy in one go. Now I'm close to beating Medium and...wow, is all I have to say. The latter songs are insane. Seriously. War Ensemble, Beautiful Morning and Disposable Heroes are just out of this world. They have some stuff you don't see until Expert in Rock Band. I guarantee that the latter songs on Medium in GH Metallica are harder than the beginning songs on Expert in Rock Band.

The good thing is, that I'm able to practice a lot more rolls, since GH Metallica seems to be obsessed with them...on Medium. I'm getting a lot better at them, but I can never figure out which hand to start with, unless I know the song very well. But even then, I might know the beat and the game throws a triplet at you, or 7 hits as opposed to 8, or something. It seems random, especially on the earlier difficulties and by the time you see the whole line of Reds (for example), you have already started the roll and didn't have enough time to count how many. Then when the rolls switch back and forth to different pads...it's impossible to think that much. I always seem to find myself ending a roll with the wrong hand, which gets me tied up and I flunk the last note or two. I'm talking mostly about 16th note rolls, not the super fast 32nd notes.

This is kinda hard to explain, but I look at where the roll starts in relation to the previous notes.

Like, if there's a gap, say, between an orange and the start of a roll of reds, and that gap is the same as the other note spacings in the song, you can deduce that you can start the red with the same hand you hit the orange with.

However, if the first red falls *in* that gap, then you'd be starting the roll with your other hand, so the hand that hits the orange hits the second red note of the roll.

TL;DR, it's not so much counting the notes but being able to determine whether there are an even or odd number of notes in the roll. You can do this by looking at where the fill starts and finishes in relation to the timing bars on the highway.